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a segue from one volley to the next. But those are just pale approximations of what it
feels
like to hear that intro, the squirt of sinister glee thatmakes most people—even decent religious folk—reach for their air guitar.
    Now consider the rest of the song: the rhythmic structures (bassline, drums), Brian Johnson’s howling vocal, harmonic and tonal relationships, etc. But okay, let’s say you’ve taken your Rock Crit Steroids and you’re able to describe all these elements. How, then, do you convey the
simultaneity
of all that noise, the blissful riot of sound we experience as a singular thing (the song)? But okay, okay, let’s say you’ve taken your Rock Crit Steroids for years, you’re the Barry Bonds of Rock Crit, and so you manage to get this, too. You’d still be left with the Basic and Insoluble Crisis of Melody: words cannot be made into notes. And even if you somehow magically solved that crisis (which you couldn’t) you’d still be missing what it feels like for a particular fan to hear a particular song (let alone songs, let alone in concert) because this involves a collaboration between the music and the fan’s own needs: his or her own lust for joy, sorrow, power, rage, sex, and—oh what the hell—hope.
    I know this from my time in the trenches, those hundreds of nights I spent with the kids who camped out overnight for tickets, or got scalped, the shy, tattered metalheads from Juárez who forked over a month’s salary for the chance to see Queensrÿche live. (Your global economy at work!) If you asked those kids to review the concert you’d get emphatic grunts.
Rad! Killer!
Which would be overstating the case, because their experience of the event wasn’t about words at all, but the annihilation of words, a fleeting return to primal self-expression when it was enough to bay like a wolf at the accretion of felicitous musical details.
    The closest I came to grappling with the Rock Crit Paradox was at an MC Hammer concert. I stood beneath the stage watching Hammer twitch in his weird Sinbad jodhpurs while a battalion of dancers in identical Sinbad jodhpurs replicated his every twitch. Hammer barked lyrics about jewelry and torture. The melodies, sampled frombubblegum hits, affixed themselves to the artillery of drum machines. Lights popped and scrolled. Sparks vomited from some invisible portal. It was like watching an ad for a delicious soda that makes people want to commit murder. This was all quite clear to me. I’d even come up with a name for this soda. 3 But then I looked at the people around me, there in the fifth row of the Pan Am Center in Las Cruces, New Mexico. They were all dancing wildly. Hooting at the sweaty-boobed flygirls and barking along with Hammer and (without even realizing it) mimicking little Hammerish flourishes: the frenetic Egyptian jazz hands and his mincing bucklestep. These people were plugged into a powerful communal experience. They didn’t look upon MC Hammer as a musical huckster, but an entertainer of the first rank and maybe even, in a sense, a prophet of self-assertion, proof that any man endowed with sufficient determination—no matter how meagerly endowed with talent—might gain trespass into the kingdom of fame. Yes, I was stoned.
    Still, it was clear my fellow congregants were having a radically different experience from the assigned critic. So I wrote two reviews that night, which ran side by side the next morning: one from my perspective (i.e. one that cold-cocked Hammer) and one from the perspective of the fans (i.e. one that fellated Hammer). This struck me as perhaps the cleverest thing anyone on earth had ever done. Pleasantly, copies of the reviews don’t exist to contradict me.
A Brief, Not Entirely Hopeful Note for Aspiring Music Writers
    It is certainly worth asking, amid this whinging, whether it is possible to write about music in a manner that doesn’t invite pity or derision. The answer is yes. Here’s a lovely paragraph I came across